The frame: magic, modernity, and the Orient

Throughout history, magic has occupied a special place on the margins of society, defining the contours of experiences that are in some way exceptional or outside the normal and everyday. To some extent, this variously privileged or denigrated position at the frontiers of human experience echoes the location of religion and even science.Footnote ¹ All three of these fields seek to provide knowledge and experience of realms otherwise inaccessible to everyday processes of cognition. At various times in Western history, magic has been differentiated from religion (especially from Christianity),Footnote ² or it has been contrasted against the rise of modern science.Footnote ³ Appropriately enough, the interrelating and interleaving of magic with both religion and science at different times has enabled the category to become evasive and tricky—the shape and dimensions of magic seem illusionary, artificial, or simply amorphous. According to particular ideological demands, magic can be paired with science as a kind of experimental and practical engagement with or attempt to master the natural world, hence shunning religion as a denial of the essential vitality of human agency in the world; on the other hand, magic can be paired with religion as a kind of appeal to transcendental realms of knowledge and power, hence shunning science as a denial of mankind's spiritual ascendancy over an ostensibly mechanical natural world.Footnote ⁴ Both characterizations commit a kind of epistemic violence, obscuring the nuances of each category in the name of simple juxtaposition, often for ideological purposes. But such deployments succeed in highlighting at least two fascinating features of magic: first, magic can be seen as implying a pluralistic type of worldview, encompassing both the conditions of the possibility of scientific method and the contradictory plausibility of transcendent or religious truths that confront those methods; and, second, magic is established as a plastic category that includes both esoteric practices and technological innovation (where one may be routinely camouflaged or performed as the other)—in other words, it affects the resolution of a basic epistemological and ontological contradiction. That is, even without a simple or stable definition, magic gives us a (non-conventional) way to think about and make sense of the world around us, and it also gives us techniques and technologies for living in and controlling that world.

In the modern period, the idea of magic has also become intertwined with powerful political and cultural discourses around the existence of the ‘Other’.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, the domain of magic itself is conceived of as a radical ‘Other’ to ordinary life.Footnote ⁶ In addition, the field of critical cultural studies has provided fertile ground for work in gender studies and post-colonial studies, both of which have dealt with questions of marginality and liminality in various ways, often under the conceptual umbrella of epistemic violence or the ‘politics of knowledge’. It is in this period, for instance, that the literature begins to explore the contradictory association of, on the one hand, women with the esoteric and ‘primitive’ practices of magic and, on the other hand, men with modern and technology-driven stage magic. This distinction tends towards the conventional (yet deeply problematic) association of modernity with reason and masculinity, and hence the marginalization of apparently ‘female’ qualities as vestiges of a pre-modern condition.Footnote ⁷ Ironically, in the context of magic, this marginalization is simultaneously an empowerment: the witch becomes a symbol of the mysterious and dangerous power of women to disrupt the ostensibly rational principles of a ‘masculine’ modern society.

In parallel to this discourse about the role and place of women at the mystical margins of modern society, since the 1970s there has been an increasing awareness of the ways in which Western societies have sought to represent non-Western cultures as lingering exemplars of pre-modern, esoteric, and spiritual practices.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, for some, this parallel can be stretched to the association of many non-Western (especially Asian) societies with the feminine, in (artificial) contradistinction to the apparently masculine values of the so-called West. Since the powerful (and controversial) work of Edward Said, it has become impossible to read nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of encounters with Asia without a consciousness of this post-colonial politics of knowledge.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, for many commentators, Said has effectively transformed the meaning of the word ‘Orientalist’ from its nineteenth century usage (someone who studies the Orient or Asia broadly defined) into its (post)modern usage (someone who attributes romantic or fantastical qualities to the non-Western world, or who deploys a quasi-fictional Orient as a representation of these qualities).

One of the core ideological issues that has arisen from this discourse is the question of whether Orientalists are genuinely interested in understanding the Orient at all, or whether they are more interested in understanding themselves and hence make use of the Orient as a canvas on which to paint their own fantasies of alien societies (or magical domains) as a mechanism of self-reflection (that is, the invention of a society that represents the instantiation of values opposite to those that the Orientalist would like to see as characteristic of his/her own society). Hence, in the case of Orientalism and magic, we see the demonstration of two competing trajectories: one, the self-identification of the West as rational and post-spiritual; and, two, the desire of the West to exist in a world replete with magic, mystery, and spiritual vitality. Of course, this tendency towards the instrumentalization of the Other (where instrumentalization and fantasization blend together) also raises deep moral and ethical questions about appropriate conduct towards people who are recognizably different from ourselves (whomsoever we might be).

In the context of the history of magic, it is fascinating to see how the precise period highlighted by Said (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) was also one in which Western magicians showed a marked interest in representations of the Orient. To some extent, we might simply see magic as an aspect of a more general cultural appreciation of Chinoiserie (which began in force a century earlier) or Japonisme (which took Europe by storm in the late-nineteenth century, after Japan finally opened its doors to foreign trade).Footnote ¹⁰ These aesthetic movements in Europe and North America reflected a more general public enchantment with the colourful cultures of distant colonies back in the metropolitan centres. This is the period of the great world fairs and international expositions, where nations such as India, China, and even the rapidly industrializing Japan would routinely represent themselves in quasi-mystical ways, deploying performances that emphasized the traditional and aesthetic elements of their culture, rather than emphasizing their tremendous technological or industrial developments—this tendency has come to known as ‘self-Orientalism’.Footnote ¹¹ At the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, for instance, the ‘Imperial Japanese Troupe’ performed the famous ‘Butterfly Trick’ and other feats of conjuring.

The impact of this cultural environment at the turn of the twentieth century was potent in both Europe and the United States. It is worth remembering, however, that this cultural pattern was not limited to the entertainment industry nor to the general population. Indeed, this was also the great age of anthropology, in which classics of that emerging discipline were read eagerly by scholars and the educated classes. Within this picture, then, we might include the seminal (if by now deeply controversial) works of Frazer, Malinowski, Mauss, and others, for each of whom (albeit in different ways) the margins of European empires were sites of encounter with ‘primitive’ or even ‘savage’ peoples still steeped in the unearthly powers of ‘real magic’.Footnote ¹² Through these accounts, high society, as well as the general population, were exposed to the idea that the most potent kinds of magic came from places beyond the everyday experience of the modern European or American; the idea that geographical distance from the metropolitan centre acted as an analogy for historical distance from the darkly mysterious history of esotericism in the West became prevalent.Footnote ¹³

However, the case of magic in this cultural history is not only particular but also special. The so-called ‘Golden Age’ of magic exactly coincides with this period, witnessing the emergence of Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, Harry Houdini, David Devant, Dai Vernon, the Maskelynes, and others, such as William Robinson (Chung Ling Soo). Modern magic was increasingly clearly associated with conjuring and technological progress; part of the joy of performance magic in this period was the mysterious potential of modern technology—magicians’ patter would be full of references to scientific advances, the powers of electricity, and mechanical devices.Footnote ¹⁴ There was an explosion of magicians who adopted stage-names involving academic titles such as ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’.Footnote ¹⁵ From the standpoint of gender studies, it is notable that this shift towards the association of magic with technological advancement witnessed a concomitant shift towards its association with men: stage magicians in the modern period have been overwhelmingly male (even though their assistants have often been female), whereas the mysteries of ‘real magic’ (in the sense of the occult, the spiritual, or the irrational) have been increasingly marginalized within Western societies and remained associated with women to a significant extent (although not completely), or with the Orient.Footnote ¹⁶

However, at the same time, this Golden Age also saw a powerful counter-Enlightenment (or Romantic) embrace of the occult, especially in the form of spirit-mediums. A number of magicians exploited this reaction to disenchantment with the modern world as an opportunity to reclaim the mysterious origins of their apparent powers.Footnote ¹⁷ This tendency was famously denounced by the legendary Harry Houdini, who invested considerable time and money exposing the very mundane techniques of fraudulent spiritualists in the name of modern values and in defence of the modernity of magic itself.Footnote ¹⁸ In the United Kingdom, the great John Nevil Maskelyne (inventor of the pay-toilet, from whom we get the expression ‘to spend a penny’)—one of the founders of the Magic Circle—also devoted considerable energy to debunking spiritualism, including by establishing the Occult Committee of the Magic Circle in London. After Houdini and Maskelyne, the differentiation between (modern) magic as a technology and craft, and (pre-modern) magic as an esoteric or spiritual practice became particularly stark.

Somewhere between these tendencies in the Golden Age of magic was the space opened up by the aesthetics and politics of Orientalism. A number of stage magicians chose to participate in the West's enchantment with the so-called ‘East’ by taking on the persona of the Arabian genii, Indian yogi, Chinese mystic, or Japanese sorcerer.Footnote ¹⁹ Taking this symbolic step into the colonial margins of Europe enabled performers to appropriate the language and tropes of ‘real magic’ without confronting the dominant narrative of Western modernity: locating magic in distant and apparently mystical or spiritual territories, which most audiences had never encountered directly, facilitated the development of esoteric characters on the stage and affected a grand style of misdirection, displacing the problem of magic in the modern world to the ‘pre-modern’ peripheries, or drawing on an origination in such peripheries as a means to claim authentic magical potency.Footnote ²⁰ Hence, Western audiences could retain their faith in their own progressive, industrial modernity while enjoying the fantasy that magic continued to thrive in the ‘mysterious East’. In addition, this geo-cultural displacement also afforded Western men the symbolic opportunity to appropriate the increasingly feminized realm of spiritual and esoteric authenticity; while the European male was supposed to be rational and devoted to technology, the Oriental male was represented as somehow retaining his connection with the more mystical and spiritual forces of the cosmos. It can be no coincidence that at the turn of the century America's first dedicated magic periodical (later to become the organ of the Society of American Magicians) was named Mahatma.Footnote ²¹

In other words, magic provides an excitingly diverse and varied landscape for our understanding of the historical engagement with the politics of imperial modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.

The performance: from Indian ropes to Chinese rings

The most famous instance of this convergence of magic, modernity, and the Orient is undoubtedly that of the fabled (and probably legendary) Indian Rope Trick.Footnote ²² This famous trick, which itself appears to have been an illusion generated by Orientalist mystique, involves a magician, a length of rope, and an assistant (usually a young boy). There are numerous and various descriptions in the literature, but the basic effect sees the magician cast an ordinary rope into the air, which becomes suddenly rigid enough for the assistant to climb it to the very top, at which point he either descends once again and the rope crumbles into a coil or, in the more spectacular versions, the boy vanishes completely.

Although there appear to be a number of pre-modern accounts of effects resembling this incredible feat,Footnote ²³ it first came to the attention of Western readers in an article in the Chicago Tribune on 8 August 1890. The journalist John Elbert Wilkie wrote the article under a pseudonym (Fred S. Ellmore = Fred Sell More) and then, four months later, published a retraction in the same newspaper, saying that the original article had been an experiment that had garnered far more attention than he had expected. In fact, the article had created a storm that had still not completely subsided in the world of magic. It spread rapidly around Europe (and was translated into a number of European languages, usually without the retraction), provoking a number of people (especially in Britain and France) to claim that they too had witnessed the illusion while in India, creating a potent mix of imagery about the mysterious colonial margins of the British empire, which itself seemed to provide an enabling condition for people to believe in the story. As is well known, the genre of Victorian travel writing is full of texts exhibiting an intriguingly fluid mixture of reportage and the fantastical—unsurprisingly, those texts dealing with magical performances appear to be no exception to this tendency.Footnote ²⁴

The legend of the Indian Rope Trick, hoax or not, was resilient and contagious—Western publics wanted to believe in it (and many still do today)—so the debate about its veracity continued intensely for the next 30 years. In fact, some of the most powerful sceptics about the Indian Rope Trick were to be found in Britain, in the prestigious Magic Circle, which held a public meeting in 1919 at which the Circle concluded that the trick was a hoax, even though by that time a number of prominent magicians were already performing (rather crude) versions of it in their shows, most famously Howard Thurston. In 1933, the Magic Circle issued its famous ‘challenge’ to anyone who could successfully perform the Indian Rope Trick in full and in natural conditions.Footnote ²⁵ The challenge was orchestrated by the Circle's (newly re-established) Occult Committee, which had been started by John Nevil Maskelyne in 1914 as a body to investigate and expose fraudulent spiritualists and to combat investment in the supernatural. Maskelyne, like Houdini, had been adamant about the demarcation of modern magic from pre-modern superstition, which he regarded as dangerous.

The real point of contention in 1933 appeared to be whether an Indian fakir or yogi could actually perform magic that a Western stage magician could not: was there really a mystical or magical secret accessible only to these mysterious and exotic men from the East? Or, were the stories of past performances simply folk stories, and were the mechanized, modern performances of versions of the trick (such as those by Thurston) really all that was possible? In seeking to unmask Orientalism, the Magic Circle offered 200 guineas to find out.

In 1935, a magician named Arthur Derby, under the assumed name of Karachi, accepted the challenge, claiming to have learned the effect from a Gurkha soldier during the Great War. However, there was much controversy around both the man and the performance. An academic in Cambridge asserted that it would be very unlikely that a Gurkha would have any such knowledge;Footnote ²⁶ others questioned (rightly) whether Karachi was really Indian or just an impostor; and, finally, it seemed that the trick he proposed (to make a rope rise vertically from his lap and then have someone climb it) was not actually the complete version of the trick proposed in the Magic Circle's challenge.Footnote ²⁷ Further controversy ensued when the Magic Circle proceeded to refuse Karachi's own challenge that he could meet their test.

Of particular interest for our purposes here is the way in which this episode played out in the context of British imperialism at the start of the twentieth century. Even as late as the 1930s it remained the case that the Orient retained an aura of mystery and magical power that had been lost by Europe and, especially, the United States. Indeed, the magic of this aura was so powerful that the world's premier magician's society felt compelled to address it directly. In many ways the Occult Committee of the Magic Circle was declaring war on Orientalism itself; its implicit challenge was for someone to prove that being from India was in itself a condition of magical empowerment, that real magic really existed on the margins of empire. Against this, the Magic Circle stood as the bastion of modern magic, representing in its own society the techniques of modernity as applied to stage and entertainment magic and illusion. If the Indian fakir could really do magic that members of the Magic Circle could not, then maybe Orientalism was not a fantasy after all, maybe the colonial margins really did sustain real magic—perhaps Great Britain's much vaunted modernity was second best to magic after all?Footnote ²⁸

In the end, consciously or not, this is why the Magic Circle refused to accept the counter-challenge of Karachi. First, he was not claiming that he could perform the version of the Indian Rope Trick that the Magic Circle found so entrancing. His counter challenge was much more in the spirit of the ‘magical duel’ between stage magicians that had been prevalent 30 years before, in which competing magicians tried to best each other in knowledge and technique, but neither made any pretence of esoteric mystery;Footnote ²⁹ the stakes in a magical duel were about mastery of stage magic, not about a confrontation between stage and ‘real’ magic—hence, in such a duel the Magic Circle had nothing to gain and nothing to prove.Footnote ³⁰ And, second, it was increasingly obvious to everyone involved that Karachi's connection with India, fakirs, and yogis was almost wholly inauthentic. He was following in the wake of a vibrant tradition of Western performers from the late nineteenth century on who had deliberately adopted the guise of an ‘Oriental’ in order to add some extra mystery to his performance and persona. Intriguingly, Karachi's case reveals that the politics of this practice was changing by the 1930s, since, as we will see in the case of Chung Ling Soo, at the turn of the century the authenticity of an ‘Oriental’ magician seems to have been judged more on the basis of the style of his magic than on the origin of the magician himself. Chung Ling Soo (the American magician whose real name was William Robinson) famously won the epithet of the ‘Original Chinese Magician’ over Ching Ling Foo (the Chinese magician whose real name was Chee Ling Qua), ostensibly because audiences associated his stage persona and act with ‘Chinese-ness’ more than they associated an actual Chinese man with Chinese-ness. For Karachi, however, neither the ‘Indian-ness’ of the Indian Rope Trick, nor of his assumed name, nor of his story about the Gurkhas were sufficient for him to be seen as authentically ‘Oriental’. The politics of race and identity had changed significantly through the Great War and into the interwar period; while the atmosphere was not yet the same as in Said's 1970s, not even magic could conjure its way back into the nineteenth century. Karachi, a fake Asian, could not manifest the confrontation between modernity and the Orient; unmasking Karachi would not unmask Orientalism.

The case of Chung Ling Soo, however, is a powerful representation of the ways in which Orientalism, modernity, and magic interact, not only because it sets the scene for Karachi and the Indian Rope Trick later, but also because of the way it calls direct attention to the intertwined problematics of origination, authenticity, and performance.Footnote ³¹ The general features of the story of William Robinson/Chung Ling Soo are well known to historians of magic; they have been evocatively presented by Jim Steinmeyer in his excellent biography.Footnote ³² However, Steinmeyer's thorough and entertaining book does not aim to unpack the mysteries of Orientalism itself. Indeed, Orientalism appears in just one (one-page) section of this book, and there it is not considered as a category in the politics of knowledge but rather in terms of its more contemporaneous usage as ‘a broad popular taste for exotic Eastern cultures that had simmered through the last years of the Victorian era’.Footnote ³³ Hence, there remains a need to interrogate the relationship between this fascinating case, Orientalism, magic, and modernity.

The salient aspects of the ‘glorious deception’ of Chung Ling Soo can be summarized as follows: William Ellsworth Robinson (1861–1918) spent much of his early career as an assistant and manager to some of the great magicians of the nineteenth century, most famously Alexander Herrmann and Harry (Heinrich) Kellar. He was an engineer and inventor of illusions, greatly valued by his employers, and also a magician of great technical skill. However, he was not naturally charismatic and lacked a strong stage presence, which made it difficult for him to launch his own stage career. After witnessing the ‘Black Art’ of Ben Ali Bey (Max Auzinger) in Germany in 1886, Robinson caught his first glimpse of the power of an Oriental stage persona as a device to enchant an audience, placing them for a moment into a space of willing disbelief at least partially because of the apparent mysteriousness of the East itself. The very next year, back in New York, Robinson adopted the name and persona of the Egyptian mystic ‘Achmed Ben Ali’, appearing at the prestigious vaudeville theatre, the New Century Museum, on Rhode Island, where he attempted to replicate not only the mystery of Arabia but also the Black Art pioneered by Auzinger in Europe.

For our purposes here, there are three noteworthy elements to this episode. First, Robinson recognized the theatrical value and liberty afforded by the adoption of a stage persona recognizably different from his own—a basic principle of stage performance. Second, Robinson appears to have intuitively connected the emancipation associated with such a persona (specifically in the performance of magic) with the guise of Orientalism (in the sense that it was a fashion redolent with exoticism at the time). And, third, Robinson (like many magicians of his age, before and since) establishes a precedent of unashamedly ‘borrowing’ the effects of inspirational or successful competitors, complete with the spirit and atmosphere of their acts. In fact, Robinson's performance as the ‘Egyptian mystic’ was certainly his most successful performance until that time; his discomfort about speaking in front of audiences was mitigated by the pantomime of foreignness that he performed. Intriguingly, when Robinson started to work with Harry Kellar, Kellar is reported to have insisted that Egyptian mystics were inferior to Indian fakirs, and hence that Robinson's persona should not be Egyptian but Indian, and thus his stage character was changed to Nana Sahib,Footnote ³⁴ who was billed as the ‘East Indian Necromancer in Oriental Occultism’ on posters which portrayed him as a wild-looking, white-bearded Indian fakir or yogi.Footnote ³⁵ Then again, when Robinson returned to the employ of Herrmann, he was advised that neither Egyptian nor Indian magic could match the Oriental conjuring found in Constantinople, so his identity was changed once again, this time to Abdul Khan.Footnote ³⁶ Like other magicians of the time, both Kellar and Herrmann professed to have direct and intimate knowledge of the Orient (from travels that are not properly substantiated) and Oriental magic.

Hence, by the time the American public encountered a real Chinese magician in the ‘Ching Ling Foo Troupe of Oriental Wonder Workers’ at the China Pavilion of the 1898 Trans Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, William Robinson had already been through various Oriental stage personas and Western audiences were already in thrall to Oriental conjuring and magic as a genre of performance. Unable to speak much English, Ching Ling Foo's act was conducted without patter—the silence of the magician apparently adding to his Oriental mystique. The signature trick of Ching Ling Foo (born Chee Ling Qua in 1854 near Beijing) was to produce a huge bowl of water from beneath a cloth in the middle of the stage without the use of trapdoors; the bowl weighed somewhere between 85 and 100 pounds, making the mystery of its earlier concealment and then production all the more remarkable. In some versions of the trick, the bowl would also contain a clutch of apples floating inside or a goldfish or even a child. So incredible was this trick at the time (and so confident of its being unreplicable was Foo) that a $1,000 dollar challenge was eventually issued for anyone who could duplicate it. Just as the ‘Butterfly Trick’ came to represent ‘Japanese magic’ and the ‘Rope Trick’ came to represent ‘Indian magic’, so Ching Ling Foo's ‘Goldfish Bowl Trick’ came to represent ‘Chinese magic’ even more than the famous and popular Linking Rings.Footnote ³⁷

The stage was set, then, for William Robinson to show a more than passing interest in this talented Chinese magician: an act with a spectacular effect previously unseen in the United States; an act performed within the aura of Orientalism; and an act that didn't require Robinson to develop or deploy charming, witty patter, but instead required a mysterious, enigmatic silence.

In fact, Robinson encountered Foo in the Boyd Theatre in Omaha in 1898, where he was performing together with Alexander Hermmann. The first encounter saw Hermmann himself (somewhat naively) perform the Chinese linking rings for Foo. The second encounter saw Foo perform the linking rings with such virtuosity that he seemed to shame Hermmann, and then he cast the rings aside as though in disgust at their simplicity, moving on to more spectacular ‘Chinese’ effects, such as the production of the water bowl and spitting fire. The next year, Ching Ling Foo was the talk of New York; his show in the Union Square Theatre was a tremendous success, and it seems that Robinson studied him closely during those performances. Thus began the magical feud between Robinson and Ching Ling Foo; and when Foo apparently declined Robinson's offer to meet his challenge and duplicate the water bowl production, the game was on.

As he had done following his witnessing of the Black Art of Ben Ali Bey, Robinson resolved to adopt and then outdo this latest Oriental(ist) wonder-worker. He adopted the stage name of Hop Sing Loo for a tour of Europe, which he quickly changed to Chung Ling Soo in advance of his return to the United States, in direct mimicry of Ching Ling Foo (presumably half as a jibe at his foe and half in the hope that he would benefit from the likely confusion of the two ‘exotic’ names by the publicFootnote ³⁸—indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the British audience of Chung Ling Soo's first-ever performance at the Alhambra Theatre in London, April 1900, genuinely thought that he was Ching Ling Foo. He was billed as ‘The Great Chinese Magician’.). He bought a (completely nonsensical) Chinese costume, much more flamboyant and colourful than the one worn by Foo,Footnote ³⁹ and resolved to adopt a ‘Chinese’ persona, not only to compete directly with his nemesis, but also to enable him to participate in the magical aura of the Orient and to excuse him from having to speak much during his act.

In the event, the act developed by Robinson in the guise of Chung Ling Soo contained very little that counted as authentically Chinese (although he performed inferior versions of Foo's water bowl production and fire spitting).Footnote ⁴⁰ Instead, the act reproduced the kind of popular stereotypes of the Orient that typified other popular entertainments of the time, such as the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta ‘The Mikado’.Footnote ⁴¹ His brash, colourful clothing and the twee mock-Oriental music spoke directly to his audience's fantasies of the Orient, allowing him to convince them (as if by magic) that he was the authentic article. His magic was exactly what they wanted to see from a ‘Chinese’ magician, and this had nothing to do with his ethnic origin nor even with the particular illusions performed. The key, which Robinson intuited as early as his first encounter with Ben Ali Bey, was the taste of the performance, the aura and atmosphere of the Orient itself, which was more of a product of Orientalism than of anywhere in the actual Orient. Ironically and conversely, Ching Ling Foo's act was relatively austere and enigmatic—he was an authentic and proud Chinese magician who did not wish to stoop to self-Orientalism in order to participate in caricatures of his own real identity. As a result, audiences began to see Robinson (who jealously guarded his real identity, encouraging the public to see his stage persona as his real one) as more Chinese than Foo. Robinson was a talented magician and his audiences were treated to a spectacular combination of virtuoso magic (whose actual or virtual Chinese-ness was irrelevant to them) and grand theatre of the most exotic and fashionable kind. With Chung Ling Soo, Robinson had finally found his perfect stage persona for that time, and in it his audiences had found an enchanting combination of magic and Orientalism.

Indeed, Robinson deliberately exploited his freedom to manipulate and participate in Orientalist fantasies, entering self-consciously into the discourse around the politics of knowledge at the turn of the century. As the British public started to hear about the Boxer Rebellion in China and public opinion started to turn against the Chinese in London, he toyed with the legends of Boxer ‘spirit soldiers’ who were invulnerable to bullets but neatly subverted the narrative so that he could perform a bullet-catching routine in which he pretended to be executed by the Boxers (Condemned to Death by the Boxers).Footnote ⁴²

Hence, by the time of the famous duel between Chung Ling Soo and Ching Ling Foo in the winter of 1904, in London, Robinson had done a remarkable job of transforming himself into a Chinese magician. Indeed, the persuasiveness of this transformation illusion had taken over his life: he brought a travelling exhibition of ‘Chinese’ (that is, random, Asian-looking) artefacts with him on tour, and showed them off in the theatres where he performed; he refused to speak English in public, instead speaking in ‘Chinese’ (that is, complete gibberish) through a translator (who was actually the Japanese Fukado Kametaro, who also could not speak Chinese and so responded with his own kind of gibberish); and he even published a book of ‘Chinese Fairy Tales’ that carried his own picture on the cover.Footnote ⁴³

Remarkably, then, Robinson himself seemed to shift the landscape of his competition with Ching Ling Foo towards a battle for the appropriation of Chinese-ness itself. When the two great ‘Chinese’ magicians were in the same city competing for the same audience (Robinson at the Hypodrome and Foo at the Empire), the battle came out into the open. It began in a low-key manner, with Foo attending Robinson's show, where (according to Steinmeyer) he snickered in the front row and whispered (in broken English) about the ‘foreign devil’ who was certainly not really Chinese. The story grew into accusations that Robinson was so ignorant about China that he didn't realize his attire would earn him a death sentence in the mother country (for inappropriately imitating royalty—and female royalty at that).Footnote ⁴⁴ Next, the Daily Express carried a challenge from Foo to Robinson, offering £1,000 if Robinson could perform ten out of 20 of Foo's tricks, or if Foo failed to perform a single one of Robinson’s.

Foo's challenge, then, was not directly to Robinson's claim to be Chinese (which, as a Chinese man himself, he clearly found so absurd that it required no challenging), but rather was an old school challenge of magical arts and showmanship. However, Robinson's response (provided in ‘translation’ by Kametaro because Soo could not speak English) brought the question of authenticity back centre-stage. Indeed, he playfully developed further Foo's accusations that he was affecting the guise of a mandarin by claiming this status for himself, saying that he’d been raised from the peasantry to ‘celestial honours’ by the empress dowager herself, and hence that it would be beneath him to consort with a ‘street juggler’ like Foo.

This was a genius response, playing directly into stereotypes of Chinese grandeur and romance, and claiming all those glorious images for Robinson, while displacing the authentic Chinese man into the less glamorous, less theatrical, and less magical role of the ordinary subject. In some ways, indeed, Foo was hampered from being seen as spectacular in his Chinese-ness precisely because he was actually Chinese. In hindsight, it was a mistake for him to allow the veracity of claims to Chinese-ness to become the stake, because in the end magic is not about truth. Indeed, it is precisely about being creative and imaginative with the common sense of reality, making a new reality which is more attractive and contagious than the everyday in which most of us are forced to live. It is about showmanship, transformation, and illusion, not truth.

Eventually, once the impact of his response had been felt, Robinson agreed to Foo's challenge, with the proviso that he be separated from Foo by a glass divide. According to Houdini, this proviso was motivated by Robinson's fear that Foo would expose him as a fraud by pulling off his braided queue to show that he wasn't ethnically Chinese.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his response Foo added one extra modification: ‘that Chung Ling Soo prove before members of the Chinese legation that he is a Chinaman’.Footnote ⁴⁶

There was, of course, no way that Robinson could agree to this latest stipulation. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Chinese community of London had not ‘outed’ him already. But, in fact, they were generally very supportive of Chung Ling Soo, since he brought positive and glamorous publicity to their community at a difficult time, whether he was really Chinese or not. In the end, the newspaper that was sponsoring the challenge, the Weekly Dispatch, ignored the additional stipulations of both Robinson and Foo. In a statement that cuts to the heart of the matter, the newspaper announced that ‘it has been sought in some quarters to change the issue into one of the nationality of the rivals. This is a mistake. The public is not interested in the ancestry of Soo or Foo, it is interested in their conjuring, and this is the question the Weekly Dispatch wished to resolve.’Footnote ⁴⁷

In other words, the Week Dispatch was trying (rather disingenuously) to sell this event as a magician's duel like any other from the nineteenth century—a simple test of skill—exactly the kind of duel that the Magic Circle was not interested in promoting around the Indian Rope Trick 30 years or so later. In the 1930s, the Magic Circle was interested precisely in examining the veracity of the myths of Orientalism; in 1904, the Weekly Dispatch sought to bracket out this question (to make it disappear, if you will) precisely in order to enable its performance on the London stage. Its disappearance, in other words, was itself an illusion. The mystique, reputations, and commercial success of both Robinson and Foo rested largely upon their participation in the aura of the Orient—in Robinson's case, this had made the difference between a solid magician technician from New York City and a magical superstar from the glamorous Orient. There was no way that the duel between Ching Ling Foo and Chung Ling Soo could ignore the manifestly obvious fact that the latter had fashioned himself as a parody, glorification, and super-Orientalization of the former.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is impossible to imagine that the editors of the Weekly Dispatch were not aware of this, and hence impossible to view their announcement as anything other than commercial cynicism—unable to resolve (or even properly engage with) the complexities of the politics of knowledge at the time, the paper sought to exploit them by manufacturing them into a spectacle.

In the end, Foo (who had sent another letter explaining that he saw no profit in participating unless his conditions were met) did not turn up to the duel on 7 January 1905, and so Robinson (who did turn up, this time with a real Chinese interpreter, just in case) was declared the winner. The incredible outcome of this was that the public came to see Ching Ling Foo—the magician from China—as the fake Chinese magician; it was as though he had taken on his persona in imitation of Robinson's Chung Ling Soo, when of course the opposite was the truth. Soo had accomplished an astonishing illusion; the simulation had become simulacra.Footnote ⁴⁹ Foo left England within a month, never to return.

Despite its announcement to the contrary, then, the Weekly Dispatch actually succeeded in demonstrating that the London public of 1905 was deeply interested in the politics of knowledge and the matter of origination, even if this was a name that it dared not speak (or that was historically unavailable to it). From the perspective of the history of magic, this event provides a neat obverse of the Indian Rope Trick challenge of the 1930s, demonstrating the primacy and power of stage magic as a means to (out)perform politics—the trick, if you will, was a moment of dramatic misdirection in which the public was led to believe that Orientalism was not at stake when really it was the stake. From the perspective of modern scholarship, one of the most fascinating (and offensive) aspects of this story is the way in which the Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo, who had every right to claim his own Chinese ancestry and to observe the falsehood of Robertson’s, was radically disempowered from doing so by the commercial imperatives at work as well as by the pervasiveness of Orientalism in society, which genuinely rendered the real China irrelevant in the face of the popular perception of what China was actually like. It was not only because Foo had poor English that he had no voice; rather, he stood for the mundane Orient itself as it confronted the magical Orient, which was created in the theatres of London, Paris, and New York by white, Western men. And in that conjured reality, it was Soo not Foo who was most authentic. Soo was the Great Chinese Magician; Foo was a magician from China. The signifiers ‘Chinese’ and ‘China’ refer to radically different epistemological realms—domains of Otherness—separated by the enabling conditions of Orientalism which characterized that period, but in which modern audiences no longer reside today, as Said demonstrates forcefully. Like magic, Foo could be from China without being Chinese, and Soo could be Chinese without coming from China—Orientalism, not Soo's pantomimical charade (and not even the training required to carry a bowl of water between his knees), was the secret to the great illusion.

The curtain: Orientalism, performance, and the present

The consideration of the nexus of Orientalism, magic, and modernity reveals some of the ways in which Orientalism has functioned as a kind of magic itself, enchanting and transforming the mundane into the fantastical (including through the deployment of its own motifs, symbols, language, and technologies). In the end, this is what all magical performance attempts and, in the appropriate context, Orientalism was a legitimate (and exciting) device of the performer of stage magic at the turn of the twentieth century. Through it was transformed the mundane, familiar, Western male magician (reliant on craft and technology to accomplish illusions) into an exotic, mysterious, Oriental with the aura of real magic coruscating around the stage. Orientalism became an authentic theatrical device, part of the language of stage magic, helping to locate the magician (and the audience) in a realm of magical possibilities in an industrial age of radical de-enchantment.Footnote ⁵⁰

However, in the present we must also ask the question of the legitimacy of this deployment of Orientalism in other contexts, not only historical but also cultural. Even within the duration of the first 30 years of the twentieth century, eventful as those years were in so many ways, it is possible to discern a shift in the contextual significance and moral legitimacy of Orientalism in the world of magic; the outcomes of Ching Ling Foo's and then the Magic Circle's challenges could not have been more different. As globalization made Europeans more knowledgeable about the rest of the world, the offensiveness of this kind of deployment of Orientalism became clear. The Magic Circle was correct in the 1930s to challenge it. And, according to these standards (although not those of London in 1905), Ching Ling Foo had been terribly mistreated; he had been rendered into an instrument or an actor and forced to participate in the great illusion of his day—transforming his own heritage into a magical effect. Having said that, it is important to distinguish between the claim that Foo was mistreated in this way, which is undeniable, and the claim that Robinson mistreated him in a special manner (beyond the way in which competition drove magicians of the period into ‘duels’ and public rivalries), which is at least contestable. Orientalism cannot be reduced to the competition between two individual magicians nor to a tactic employed by one to best the other. Indeed, part of its magic is the way in which it transforms the people participating in it, making it hard to locate a locus of responsibility. This is one of the basic ethical conundrums in the wider literature of Orientalism since Said, which in general (and correctly) asserts that nineteenth century Orientalism (and its legacy) is offensive to us today: Orientalism is the name for the violence done to Ching Ling Foo in order to enable his domination by William Robertson.

Today, the association of the Orient with magic and mystery retains a kind of nostalgia, which itself has come to be recognized as a form of Orientalism. However, it is no longer the case that the general public would assume that an Indian or a Chinese man would be somehow more essentially magical than someone from London or New York. The rise of street magicFootnote ⁵¹ demonstrates clearly that the ‘margins’ in which audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief regarding magic have shifted from the distant peripheries of empire to the boundaries of domestic society, in subcultures and subversion. In magic, the new Orientalism revolves around Brooklyn and Bradford. Meanwhile, Asia, especially East Asia, has become enwrapped in a new kind of Orientalist discourse than we might call techno-Orientalism, which is not entirely divorced from notions of enchantment (as many science fiction writers will attest)Footnote ⁵² but which associates Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo with technologies so far in advance of the everyday that they begin to resemble magic. Contemporary Asia as a trope in performance culture, then, casts a more natural and powerful spell at technology trade shows than on the magician's stage. Orientalism as a device of stage magic now resides in the realms of nostalgia, which (of course) has a magic of its own.